THE DOUBLE BOND

English biographer Angier (Jean Rhys, 1991) gracefully explores the life of the great Italian writer and Holocaust survivor.

“Auschwitz killed him 40 years later,” declared newspaper headlines when Primo Levi committed suicide in 1987 at the age of 68. Elie Wiesel, Bruno Bettelheim, and other witnesses to genocide concurred, as if to say “even Primo Levi could not survive Auschwitz after all.” But Levi, who chronicled his concentration camp years in such books as The Truce and If This Is a Man, was not driven to kill himself by the haunting memories of that horrible time, writes Angier. Instead, she reveals, the fear of infirmities brought on by advancing years, a gnawing unhappiness over the state of the world, a difficult relationship with an imperious mother, and a lifelong tendency to melancholy all combined to drive the writer to fatal despair. The author knows her subject well and has brought exhaustive research to her task—a difficult one, given Levi’s famous reserve. Angier does not share his reticence, and if there’s a flaw here, it’s that she too often inserts herself as an actor in the narrative. As she wrestles with questions of how much to reveal of Levi’s life, for example, she describes it as a story that “upset some of the clearer ideas of good and evil, some of the higher hopes of human nature that he’d helped us to hang on to, despite everything.” Still, this is a rich, nuanced portrait of a man who lived through the worst horrors imaginable without betraying his fellow sufferers, who carried those memories for four decades, and who survived for as long as he did, as Angier says, “because he decided from the beginning or very near it to observe, understand, and remember every detail of this world.”

A revealing companion to Levi’s own considerable body of work, and an uncommonly thoughtful example of biography as literature in its own right.